In computer science, an atomic operation is an operation during which a processor can simultaneously read a location and write it in the same bus operation. Wikibooks Wikiversity has more about this subject: School of Computer Science Open Directory Project: Computer Science Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies Belief that title science in computer science is inappropriate Categories: Computer science | Academic disciplines ... A CPU The exact term processor is a sub-system of a data processing system which processes received information after it has been encoded into data by the input sub-system. ...

This prevents any other processor or input-output device from writing or reading memory until the operation is complete. Atomic implies indivisibility and irreducibility, so an atomic operation must be performed entirely or not performed at all. This article is about the computer interface. ...